The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and uses, but may not constitute prior art.
Internet video accounts for over three-quarters of all internet traffic today, and will increase further to 82% by 2022, according to Cisco's February 2019 Visual Networking Index (Cisco VNI™ Global IP Traffic Forecast for 2017-2022. The same report predicts that from 2017 to 2022, global Internet video traffic will grow four-fold, live Internet video will grow 15-fold, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality traffic will grow 12-fold, and Internet gaming traffic will grow 9-fold. In the U.S., millennials between the ages of 18 and 34 are driving the growth of video streaming through the use of services like YOUTUBE, NETFLIX, HULU, and HBO. Streaming video among this group has jumped 256% from an average of 1.6 hours per week to 5.7 hours per week according to a SSRS Media and Technology survey, and mobile devices are leading the charge in video consumption.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which are systems of distributed servers that minimize delay in delivering data to users by reducing the geographical distance between servers and users, are predicted by Cisco to carry 72% of Internet traffic by 2022, and they play an important role in distributing web content and streaming video data, by providing a backbone infrastructure to deliver data streams to end users. A major limitation of today's CDN networks is the so-called “last-mile” delivery problem, where a “last-mile” link between a limited number of Point-of-Presence (POPs) data centers and end users presents a bottleneck in the data streaming and delivery pipeline and often leads to less optimal user experience, including link failures, noticeable delays, choppy streams, poor picture quality, and frequent rebuffering. Another major concern is the CDN bandwidth cost, which can easily reach tens of millions of dollars per year for popular sites. These issues become more prominent with the coming era of high resolution digital media, for example 4K, 8K, and 360° VR streaming, and upcoming technologies such as light field streaming. For example, bandwidth requirements of today's mainstream 720p/HD streams jump by orders of magnitude for the newer systems.
To overcome such bandwidth limitations, decentralized peer-to-peer data streaming and delivery platforms have been developed based on self-organizing and self-configuring mesh networks. End users share redundant or unused computing, bandwidth, and storage resources, although distributed storage can make locating a requested file difficult. In addition, motivating and incentivizing users to actively share available resources require a secure and minimally delayed award system or payment method that is compatible with the decentralized natured of the peer-to-peer network, where it is also important to economically handle frequent, minuscule payments for small, individual data chunks transmitted to or received from peer nodes.
Therefore, in view of the aforementioned difficulties, there is an unsolved need to provide a low-latency, high-throughput, and micropayment-incentivized decentralized data streaming and delivery system.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.